Half Cleveland Dad

Groovin'

Although I always liked kids I never spent that much time around babies before Sweet Potato came along.  In high school I had a job at at day care, helping out in the five-year olds's room, and formed the view that kids under five were not hardy or articulate enough to have fun (or to be much fun).  So I was surprised that Sweet Potato, even as a baby, seemed to have so much personality, even when she was more like a real sweet potato than a ... a puppy, even, not to mention a person. 

One of the strong streaks in her personality has always been a definite preference for certain musics.  Here are some:

1. Behm Pum Pyme!  Not sure they were her first words, but Sweet Potato used some of her earliest powers of speech to request this CD by name.  I can't even find a proper link to it, and I don't know where we got it, but it's a deeply irritating Casio-accompanied recording of classic kids's tunes from New Zealand called Baby's First Fun Time.  We exposed her to a lot of music, but she just knew this was made for kids, and, in the car, still requests it sometimes.  My point here is that her preferences in music may be strong, but I don't want to say anything about them being good. We still have this dreadful product in the car, because it is still an effective tantrum placation tool.  She loves it too much!  Jesus christ, Beeb the Mom is telling me right now how delighted Sweet Potato was to hear it today after a long break; Beeb had played to see if Sweet Potato had gotten over it yet.  I'm afraid she's imprinted on it somehow.
2. Dora the Explorer Music to Go.  I picked this up at a discount kiosk on a lunch break or something over a year ago.  I didn't know anything about Dora at the time, and pressed a button to hear it.  The cool Dora theme song came on, and I got it, thinking it'd be Latin kids's music or something.  In fact, it's the Dora theme songs and a bunch of kid "standards" (Twinkle Twinkle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, etc.) with new lyrics about Dora and her pals.  Sweet Potato has always loved this thing:  the size, the number of tunes, the volume, the repetition, the "it's mine" quality -- it's great for her.  At first I hated these crappy toy music players, but now I see how the control over the music is important, and sweet, and boss.  (The exception is the "Yo Gabba Gabba" dance mat Sweet Potato got from a neighborhood kid for her birthday.  I told Beeb that, when that kid has his third birthday, I'm going to get him a real gun.)  We have this thing, which is full of moronic and kind of hateful "educational" features, but the music is interesting, and Sweet Potato loves dancing around it in her room.  The plague ditty, Ring Around the Rosie, has a cool, abstract contrapuntal development.  Maybe someone can tell me if it's retrograde inversion! 
3. Purple Stripes.  Former Cleveland artist girlprinter send Sweet Potato this CD, made by her (gp's)hometown pals.  Sweet Potato and I used to dance to this music at breakfast time, but I realized that she was also listening to it intently.  It has a lot of what she likes -- uptempo, female vocals, clear rhythmic patterns in the upper register.  This was Sweet Potato's first "big girl" music fave.
4. Beck.  Modern Guilt was my dishwashing/beer drinking CD for a couple of months, and sometimes I played it at breakfast.  Again, in Sweet Potato's early language days, Beeb the Mom put it on one afternoon, and Potato said, deddhi likes dhis wun.  Then for a while she requested it almost every morning.  I would try to put on my favorite band, Camera Obscura (a record our Potato called boom boom, after its opening beats), but Potato would insist on a change:  noooo boom-boom!  I like Beck!  Pudhohn Be-eck!
5. Salsa.  When Sweet Potato was born we listened to a lot of Latin music -- a lot of Afro-Cuban stuff, but also a fair amount of straight-up salsa.  Later, Beeb the Mom put on the exquisite Guillermo Portabales, and our Potato said, saw-sah!  I think she just recognized the clave pulse.
6. Elizabeth Mitchell.  This is our new record for the car, strategically played by Sweet Potato's parents as a first defense against Baby's First Funtime.  Beeb the Mom found a bunch of EM in the library, and we had the happy surprise of hearing this beautiful banjo version of Zo-san at a time when we were singing the song a lot ourselves.  Sweet Potato also loves that Marley cover, Three Little Birds.
7. Baloney-us.  Sweet Potato took to this immediately; also to the London Sessions.  Beeb the Mom said that the constant requests for Baloney-us got her listening more closely, and got converted herself to that fantastic Monk space.
8. Spih-nuhs.  These days, breakfast is all about Spin-nuhs!  I like Spin-nuhs, Da-Dhee!  I try not to put it on right away because Sweet Potato goes into her spinning dance (which also involves some Bollywood-like hand gestures and backwards strutting), and delays the actual breakfast intake.  I love listening to this record with her, because I loved these songs in my AM radio childhood.  I had a small radio about the size of the Dora player, and kept it under my pillow for years. 

You could say, oh, she just likes the music her parents like, but she's been indifferent to a lot of our favorites:  Andras Schiff, Dvorak, Bollywood collections, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Fela, Steve Lacy, Air, etc.  She's also been indifferent to other kids's music, most notably Dan Zanes.  She also hates it when I play the guitar, marching right up to it and pressing her hand over the strings.

Fall

Is the sense of anticipation and challenge that we get in the fall just a hangover from our years and years of starting school?  Or is it something more elemental, an animal response to the chilled and tannic wind, the long dusk, the moon bright in the daytime sky?

Sweet Potato’s two and a half, and her dad's limbic experience of this fall is mixed in with her animation -- her movement, her voice, her new complexity. 

Here are some fragments:

 
Here’s our Potato in Wendy Park, a corner of the city isolated by Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga River, a freight line, a salt mine, and a marina.  A man named Dan Moore has been trying to develop Wendy Park; it’s named after one of his daughters, who died from head injuries sustained in a ski accident.  Dan Moore runs another business developing recreational helmet technology.  Another Wendy tribute is the Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artists program at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art.  Dan Moore is a full Cleveland dad.

 

Our fahmalee was trudging along, when a freight train came along the track bordering the park.  Sweet Potato took off in her beautiful hustling run, turned her smiling face to shout “IT’S A CHAIN!” and ran all the way to the park fence.  Her chugging posture, her expression, her plain happiness; the swift, complex autumn sky; the worn, anxious city.

Here it’s Sweet Potato’s sweetness and full-hearted pleasure in participating, helping, sharing.  This was her first little bucket of apples; she filled up again about eight more times.  Thanks, Unca Cah-lole!

***

Sweet Potato has usually named her friends (as she calls them) pretty literally:  Lovey, Arf, Baby, Plastic Baby, et al.  Yesterday, though, she named a couple friends who each had been known vaguely as “pup”:  the larger one is now called Pistachio Name, and the smaller one, Cindy Tootin’!

Destructo

I’ve been meaning to say this for a while:  I am very sorry about the global warming.

Around the time I was in the fourth or sixth grade, I received and clung to some bit of information, to wit, “if the earth’s average orbit were six feet closer to the sun, the planet would become so hot that all life on earth would end.”  Perhaps I was also receiving at that time certain information about the life cycle of stars, which basically indicated that the sun was going to get huge and red and engulf the stupid dead earth in the end, anyway.

Anyway, I secretly started jumping in my bedroom as hard as I could.  At night, when the impact would most effectively drive the planet toward to the sun.  Not because I a master plan to destroy all life on earth, but because I had an experimental, what-the-hell-let’s-see-what-happens type of attitude about doing stuff.  I would check each day to see if was hotter than the day before.

Obviously, I didn’t destroy all life.  But dude, look at Sydney, and the Aral Sea, and the expansion of the Sahara.

Like I said, I'm sorry, and I'm sorry to you, my Sweet Potato.  Which is why we're doing so much jumping up and down in the daytime lately.